Monday, 9 May 2016

Day 39 / 326 to go

Believe it or not, but the whole day I was somewhat excited to have a
training session in the evening! Indeed, I was looking forward to it
and I caught myself a few times wondering what I should do (opening? or
endgame? or practise my PAT?)... 8-)

I consider this to be a very good sign. Actually, for two reasons:

my bad performance during the Wunsiedel Open did not surpress my motivation

the
absence of training or at least the considerable reduction in training
during the last two weeks (based on my participation in two tournaments)
makes me miss something I (obviously) like doing!

Ok ok, after some travel early this morning and a hard day´s work, my motivation simply has to fight a bit with some sort of
fatique. Nevertheless, I spent the obligatory hour on practising my PAT.
(BTW: Although I performed pretty bad in my
latest tournament, I finally managed to include my PAT more often and
somewhat more "regular". So the "PAT-thinking process" is finally
kicking in...)
The following position (my fore-last for today; together with the last I did today) was an eye-opener; white to move:

The piece to move is rather obvious and there are - at least for me - two possible squares to head for. (The bishop could move to d2 and head for c3 or go via e3 and land on c5 - with the support of the b4-pawn.) But which one is the better one? Well, to be very honest, I simply answered this question prosaically, i.e. without any sort of concrete calculation/variation in mind, but by means of some "smart sounding buzzwords" convincingly whispered to myself! A big mistake!So from now on, even when the puzzle to solve may only ask for the very next move, my considerations have to include a concrete - and most important a decent - variation!

In addition, I did a one lesson (of slightly less than one hour) on basic endgame principles in de la Villa´s book; with a decent amount of time spent on simply doing a recap on stuff I did some weeks ago...